When nations announce mega or even giga construction projects, it becomes a political statement. That’s the nature of humanity, that’s the side effect of our current notions of nationhood. When Saudi Arabia announced The Line as part of its massive NEOM project and His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 for the nation, it was greeted with both awe and trepidation.
Awe because this will be a 200m-wide, 170km-long rethinking of what urban living can be, a megastructure that gives its expected 9 million residents all the services and amenities of a city, but without all the poison of modern cities such as pollution, social inequity arising from poor urban planning, and traffic congestion. There will be no cars, no streets – travel is by hyperloop, and it allows residents to go from one end of The Line to the other end (again, 170 km away) in half an hour. It is an extension of the massive NEOM project, which will include OXAGON, a futuristic, clean, sustainable industrial complex and port, Trojena, a sprawling mountain tourism hub and Sindalah, a luxurious resort island.
Powered purely by renewable energy and green technologies, The Line is designed, constructed and independently administered in a way that is unencumbered by the outdated and inefficient economic and environmental infrastructure that constrains other countries. It was built with the future in mind.
But its announcement has also been met by trepidation because it seems too big, too ambitious. No nation has done anything like that. At a recent Discover NEOM event in Pasir Panjang Power House, some members of the team behind NEOM described it as the greatest construction project in human history after the pyramids of Egypt. It’s a lofty claim, one that Saudi Arabia’s political opponents are keen to see fail. And we’ve seen projects like this fall to the wayside – projects dreamed up by national leaders, that were supposed to galvanise a nation, but end up burning millions if not billions of dollars on works that end up as derelict edifices blighting a cityscape. In Singapore, we’ve had a small pinch of it with the on-again, off-again Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High Speed Rail.
But Saudi Arabia has the means – and the determination – to prove its detractors wrong. It is a young nation, with over 67% of its population under 35 as of 2020, according to a report by the Saudi Press Agency. It has a breathtakingly abundant sovereign fund. Its leadership has masterfully pivoted Saudi’s cultural standing in the world, making strides in the realms of sports, art, business and tourism. We discuss this further in depth in our conversation with His Excellency Mr. Abdullah Almadhi, the Saudi Ambassador to Singapore.
There’s also another perspective we can take when looking at The Line. As much as we are political animals, we should look at the significance of this undertaking beyond the realm of geopolitics.
We should look at the bigger picture: The Line is important for us as a species. It will prove that we can radically change our ways for the betterment of human civilization and the Earth, and radical change is needed to solve the dire straits we are in as a species, especially from a climate change and social inequality perspective. One has seen us wipe out swaths of species of flora and fauna that we share the Earth with, and the other has seen one man buy an entire social media platform for $44 billion just for vanity’s sake, while $44 could mean the difference between life and death for another.
As it is the first of its kind, The Line isn’t perfect. But the ancient Egyptian pyramids took generations to perfect. Starting from crude brick mastabas, it evolved into stepped pyramids like the famous stepped Pyramid of Djoser (which recently had its own Netflix docuseries) before becoming the magnificent, eternal Wonders at Giza.
But just as you can’t get the Great Pyramids without first having mastabas, we can’t get the utopias we dream of without first having The Line. Or I could be wrong – The Line could very well be that utopia we’ve been searching for as a species.
